Software for digitally perserving older magazines

July 18, 2004 12:36 PM

Suppose one wanted to scan each page of a magazine and produce a PDF file including each page in order. Is there any free software that makes this process less painful than my current solution (My current solution is to scan each page, drop them into word and then print as pdf in OSX)? It seems like there would be, but my google consultation has been fruitless.
Alternately, is there a better way to electronically preserve and distribute a long out-of-print magazine? The folks who share large runs of comic books over bittorrent spring to mind as possible sources of insight, but again, Google fails me.
posted by adamkempa to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

Your scanning software ought to be able to save scanned images directly to PDF files without having to use Word as an intermediary. Alternatively, you should be able to save the scanned images as TIFFs, and use an app like TFF2PDF to batch convert.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 12:56 PM on July 18, 2004

where can I find these torrents?
posted by Grod at 12:57 PM on July 18, 2004

I'd cut out at least the intermediary step of dropping into Word: use Image Capture to scan your page and print to PDF from there...
posted by JollyWanker at 2:26 PM on July 18, 2004

My scanning software allows for multiple page scanning -- when it's done with one page, it saves it and prompts for the next page. And like monju_bosatsu said, the software should allow you to scan directly to PDF.
posted by jragon at 2:27 PM on July 18, 2004

Grod, a little bird tells me that if one were to punch "supernova.org" in their location bar, click on the "comics" link at the top to the resultant, then on "misc", all would be revealed.
posted by bonehead at 2:27 PM on July 18, 2004

I know you don't wanna hear this, but (gawd!) life became so much easier when broke down (ate macaroni for a week) and bought an overpriced copy of Acrobat Pro.
posted by RavinDave at 3:24 PM on July 18, 2004

Grod, suprnova is definitely the place to start, but check where they get their links from-- those tend to be the good sites.

Comic book torrents are usually cbr files instead of pdfs; cbrs are just zip files full of jpegs. The jpegs are numbered sequentially and the reader does the rest. Unfortunately, this would require everyone to get the (free) application before they can see your files.
posted by yerfatma at 4:13 PM on July 18, 2004

some more business-geared scanners have accessory attachments that you can feed pages into for auto scanning. If you work at a corporate cube farm that might have something like that, you might make nice with the admin assistants and see if they can give you a tutorial, and then work after hours.
posted by Hackworth at 5:09 PM on July 18, 2004

thanks to yerfatma and bonehead for the comic book download lesson .. I'm currently downloading a few sets of books that I lost over the years and I'm greatly looking forward to re-reading them.
posted by rks404 at 5:12 PM on July 18, 2004

Some god of Mac OS X would have to help you with this as unfortunately I don't have time right now, but I'm sure you could rig together something using AppleScript/ghostscript/imagemagick and/or pstopdf which took a folder full of images and turned them into a PDF with one image per page.
posted by wackybrit at 1:22 AM on July 19, 2004